The Gulf Coast Blog

Craft • Culture • News

Craft • Culture • News

Samuel Amadon

A few weeks ago, I was in New York for a wedding and I stopped by the apartment of a former professor of mine to catch up. We talked for a while about what he was teaching, the students in his workshop, Houston, the election, and he read me one of his…

Ian Stansel

A recent article in New York Magazine describes Full Fathom Five, a project created and headed by James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces and a couple novels. The article is written by a young writer who almost became one of more than a dozen in…

Ian Stansel

I've been thinking about influence lately. And perhaps partly because of a couple recent posts on this blog, I've been thinking about influence in the context of gender. Not too long ago I was in workshop and we were discussing a published book by a female…

Janine Joseph

Perhaps like many others, I grew up listening to the music of my parents. There were, of course, some minor deviations--I clearly remember listening to a popular song by the Filipino rapper, Andrew E, and dialing (and redialing) the phone number he sung…

David Tomas Martinez

My name, David Tomas Martinez, is the Mexican equivalent of John Smith, and like many of my friends, I played sports growing up. In my neighborhood, running the football got dances with the prettiest girls, and being able to fight was an apotrope to black…

Jameelah Lang

Maybe it's because I've been watching too much Jersey Shore, but lately I've been thinking about the world in terms of manliness. Don't you judge me. On Jersey Shore, the guidos try to figure out who is the manliest and sexiest through a series of manly…

Jessica Wilbanks

For the past year or so, The Paris Review Interviews has been hanging out in my Amazon shpping cart, but at $40, the price of the four-volume boxed set was a little too steep for my graduate school budget. So I was delighted to read in a recent New York…

Aja Gabel

Last week, I showed my Mad Men-virgin friend (yes, they still exist) the pilot episode, the one in which Pete tells Peggy in Don Draper's office that it wouldn't kill her to show her ankles more. After the episode, my friend asked me, with a dose of skepticism,…

Kristina Marie Darling

$138,000 into the story, there is nowhere else to go. I spent my twenty-seventh year typing letters of application, the nerves in each hand wrecked by this seemingly endless work, my persistence motivated only by the fear of becoming homeless. Three…